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Everyone has different standards for verisimilitude. I’m often amused by the anecdotes from other players who inhabit crazy gameworlds that are bursting at the seams with preposterous creatures. They think nothing of doing a dungeon where an Ogre will inhabit an unadorned room next to a Black Pudding, who both live next door to a Dire Bear and an Earth Elemental. Stories like this make me laugh because I can’t help but picture what life must be like for these monsters in the dungeon as they sit around waiting for adventurers to show up. Talk about “The Odd Couple”. Actually, that’s a pretty cool idea for a comic: A sitcom-styled story about a bunch of freakish monsters who inhabit a trap-and-treasure laden dungeon, learning to love and laugh… together.

The difference, it seems to me, is between people who just want to accumulate loot/experience points and people who want to create a story. If all you care about is playing a multiplayer version of Rogue then the Gelatinous Cube inhabiting the room next to the Troll and down the hall from the Looming Shade works great. But if you are trying to create a story that dungeon menagerie will be difficult to explain.

Sadly, I don’t get the joke — is the name of that band “The Skanky Fists” or something? In any event, Shamus’ comments on world verisimilitude are spot on. How on earth these monsters would LIVE if “no one has gone into that tower for years” is beyond me. What would they eat — air? Each other? If that were the case, the after 10 years or so there’d be nothing left but maybe one or two really buff monsters!

That’s the reason my dad makes for silly creatures like Digesters, and bizarro creatures like that.

I mean, what the hell sustains them? And why are they living next to a couple of Ogres, half a dozen Drow, and a Pink and Blue Polkadot Demi-Lich of the Fifth Circle of Doom, in the natural cave next to a farm?

I never knew that D&D had “stories” when I played 20 years ago. Every game was a dungeon with the eclectic group of monsters. There were no “side-quests,” because a quest was just going into a dungeon, fighting monsters who had no business being there, next to the other monsters, or in a dungeon in the first place. And the first time we did a session outside of a dungeon, my fighter goes into a bar in town and is immediately set upon by the *entire* bar patronage who wish to take advantage of him in unhealthy ways. DM thought he was funny. He didn’t DM anymore. I think I had my fighter commit hare karey (sp?) before he was accosted.

‘twould be fun to play again with a group that has an imagination and some skills in playing/DMing. Right after my kids move off to college.

The problem with many adventuring parties is that the absurdity of having loads of different unnatural creatures packed into a dungeon is less important than the fact that those creatures pump out XP and treasure. To hack-and-slashers, monsters are simply terrain, which is cut through and climbed over to move on.

I’m often amused by the anecdotes from other players who inhabit crazy gameworlds that are bursting at the seams with preposterous creatures.

To cover a gap in my campaign, I once ran a module from a “Living” campaign. It looked a bit cheesy, but it kinda-sorta fit, and I had nothing prepped at the time, so…

The players absolutely despised it. Comments ranged from “Railroad!” to “It’s the Random Critters and Templates Table!” to “Just how many low-charge magic items can a GM give the critters and still respect himself in the morning?”

First time posting a comment. I have been reading this for ages and adoring it all the way. Thank you, Shamus, you make 3/5 of my workweek worthwhile. :D

Now about them creatures – It really depends on the story. If we’re talking about relatively intelligent creatures (relatively, as in, could probably understand a^2+b^2=c^2 faster than a carrot) with their own society, then yes, the number of different creatures you encounter will likely be limited. But if you’re talking about one smart dude (wizard, mage, lich, whatever) and a dungeon, well, then it makes perfect sense that he/she/it would have 1,983,275 different creatures for the adventurers to fight. If they beat the Bugbears, they might not survive the Gelatinous Cubes. If they beat the Cubes, there’s a good chance the Shadow Cats will kick their asses, yes? There’s still a story in there, but it’s about the freaky menagerie/pet-owner vs. a band of roving adventurers instead of being about a country (or countries) at war.

A major issue for my campaigns is whether the ecosystems portrayed in the environments I create are plausible. Thus it is not common for my players to find vampires living next door to kobolds. Nor do gelatinous cubes roam freely around goblin lairs.

But this presents a quandary, and Shamus has neatly capsulized it in this comic. How do you provide an engaging diversity of challenges for your characters if you are trying to also create a plausible ecosystem or culture?

Are goblins likely to share their homes with mindless devouring beasts who would chow down on little goblin imps at will? Goblins are not stupid, or not that stupid anyway. Plus they are not that bad in a fight. So it’s unlikely that they would not either clear out their homes or else move to a new place if they couldn’t get rid of the Beholder down the hallway.

The best I’ve come up with is to have the kobolds and goblins use “pets” of varying sorts to protect their home, much as humans might use dogs. Plus the inhabitants of the lair frequently have visitors from other lairs, some of the same species, some not.

But I have to be honest and admit that a steady diet of kobolds and goblins gets old after a while and I start wondering how I can introduce something more exotic without the immediate reaction of “how do the goblins live next to THAT thing?”

Tonight, in fact, I have something special planned for precisely that reason, so this is very good timing for me Shamus….

This and what you covered in your after-comic comment are things I have shrived to avoid in the world I am building.
I try to have the location of creatures make sense and to keep consistent in my adventures. But I also try to keep plenty of variety, each region should have at least 2 or 3 common creatures.

One of the best adventures I have read or run was one where an old powerful wizard knew his days were numbered and he didn’t want to become a lich.

He also knew that adventurer types would show up to take his loot after he died. He didn’t particularly like the idea of all his hard earned items waiting in some chest for an adventuring party, so he decided to make a game of it.

He made up a labyrinth/tomb where his cache of magic goodies were active defenders of the tomb. Then, he advertised in all the nearby towns of a NEW TOMB TO LOOT and provided directions. He then placed himself at the end with the nonmagical loot and drank poison. As long as you did not disturb his body, you would be free to grab everything else. If you messed with the body a nasty demon was summoned to lay some beatdown.

In the real world, animals move into abandoned buildings quickly. In the D&D world, the animals are just a tad more varied. And what do they eat? Kobolds & goblins, of course! They’re small, they’re everywhere, & they mate faster than Aphrodite priests!

Reverend Jim, thats just evil. Although really funny. Personally, I think one of the best ways to incorporate other monsters in say, a goblin camp would be in a zoo like thing. The gelatinous cube was trapped in a pit, and the goblins use it as a trap, the howlers are mounts, and the hydra is kept in a locked room in front of the cave, the goblins just use the hidden back door that medium creatures can’t fit through. The hydra is also fed from above.

I love Legolas. I love him and his player so much for their total and complete disregard to the rest of the party if they have the chance to kill things. Preferably before anyone even knows what the hell is going on.

*STILL waiting to see what happens with dead!Gollum* Do we get a zombie!Gollum, perhaps?

I have to say, that’d definitely be me. I still have my monstrous manual from the mid-nineties, you know, the one with like twenty different kinds of giant, and I’d definitely be like, “Could you at least throw some Bugbears at us? Maybe just a few Gibberlings?”

quoted from Jennifer Snow:
It’s kind of ironic, actually, because the guys riding the elephants were actually Evil Humans from the south. I don’t know whether or not that was intentional but it was even more amusing.

I don’t think Legolas’s player listened to or even cared about the description of the riders.

While I try to keep some sense to the menagarie of critters I put in my game, I never worry too much about it. Afterall, in a game where a man can throw balls of fire with a few gestures and words, sciences such as physics or ecology just tend to take a back seat.

Why? Why should you throw all the rules out the window just because you’ve got a few extra rules for magic? Unless magic is directly involved, I don’t see that you have any justification for ignoring anything. Even when magic is involved you should still use logic and common sense rather than… well, what is the alternative? Everything is completely random?

Yeah, the old RPG books that described 30 different species of sentient, empire-building creatures always irritated me, too — the same way that token beasties aren’t going to end up within dungeon-rooms of eachother, token civilizations of monsters aren’t going to end up within a few day’s ride of eachother without one group’s conquest & eradication…

(Speaking of which, the website link is an old cheap javascript demonstration of what an Ogre, Goblin, Ghost & Demon hanging out might be like. Moreover, I’ve always thought all the James Bond villian’s sidekicks should rent a beach house somewhere. It would be the greatest show on earth)

The problem with most fantasy worlds, D&D or otherwise, is that the predator to prey ratio is hugely out of balance. The game books are filled with various large carniverous mammal-like creatures that GMs love to sprinkle about to rankle the PCs.

Unfortunately, the number of prey animals required to feed all these predators would mean that the adventurers could not walk down the road without trodding upon rabbits (or other small prey species) with every step.

The reason so many big cats can live in close proximity in Africa is that there are literally thousands of gazelle and wildebeast to hunt nearby. Even so, the big cats don’t live overly close in proximity to one another and prey competition is high (with lions and hyenas often kill-stealing from the other predators who would rather not face them down).

Where am I going with this? Well, you could try to model reality more closely, but that would really mean the PCs could wander for days before an encounter with a dangerous “monster”, which would probably run away. So what to do? Ignore the laws of reality and throw monsters at them left and right.

On a slightly different topic from monster ecology–while fighting only a single type of monster is boring (but realistic), what’s really annoying is fighting a single TYPE of monster that interacts differently with different players. Like, say, a campaign full of nothing but undead–lots of fun for the cleric, not so much fun for the rogue…

Only in direct combat. If your Big Bad Evil Guy™ is a necromancer with a whole army of undead, you can’t fight all of them even with a cleric. What you can do is infiltrate his keep and assassinate him, and the rogue will have plenty to do in that scenario.

“The problem with most fantasy worlds, D&D or otherwise, is that the predator to prey ratio is hugely out of balance. The game books are filled with various large carniverous mammal-like creatures that GMs love to sprinkle about to rankle the PCs.

Unfortunately, the number of prey animals required to feed all these predators would mean that the adventurers could not walk down the road without trodding upon rabbits (or other small prey species) with every step.”

And of course, the universal answer: “A Wizard did it.”

Specifically, the hand-wave answer is that many of these beasties were created by sorcerous means, and as a result actually draw most of their sustenance from the Weave (or whatever your world calls ambient magic). They just eat adventurers for the taste. :)

>>Stories like this make me laugh because I can’t help but picture what life must be like for these monsters in the dungeon as they sit around waiting for adventurers to show up. Talk about “The Odd Couple”. Actually, that’s a pretty cool idea for a comic: A sitcom-styled story about a bunch of freakish monsters who inhabit a trap-and-treasure laden dungeon, learning to love and laugh… together.

This is why I rarelly do massive dungeons.Its much easier to have your players go through a few caves and towns during a session,and they wont complain about either having the same monster gazillion times,or about having ridiculous menagerie.But when the story asks for a huge dungeon,I find its best to populate it with undead and or golems,since thats the easiest one to explain.Of course,a few controlers of one race are just a bonus here.

This is why I have very few ‘dungeons’ on my game-world. Only ones [‘pleasure dungeons’] – that I have were built by incredibly powerful mages that stock the places with monsters and treasure, then sit back with popcorn & scrying devices to watch adventurers come in fight / die / kill / loot. [It’s the closest thing to TV ^_^]

I recall a series of articles in Dragon Magazine, way back when, called “the ecology of “. They explained how things like gelatinous cubes survived day to day, so you could create dungeons that would work as ecosystems. I guess that adventurers could then come along and disturb those ecosystems and, following a process of natural selection, produce weird mutant variants of monsters. That would be pretty cool.

To evolve a gelatanous cube [1], say, would require either hundreds of millions of years of dungeoneering adventurers or an obscenely high mutation rate. (The latter might explain why the capabilities of even standard creatures and races change quite frequently. This, however, would seem to occur in a manner similar to a grossly exaggerated version of punctuated equilibrium, with long periods of no change punctuated by short periods of very rapid change [3.X, I’m looking at you!])

That aside, given that most D&D worlds were created by active deities, it is quite possible that some of this was some form of ‘divine guided’ evolution, or even flat up creation in the first state, then direct intervention whenever a change should occur. The fact that no NPCs seem to notice these changes (Green Dragons’ breath suddenly behaving like acid, rather than undefined ‘corrosive gas’ comes to mind) might lend support to the theory of divine involvement, or else simply comment on the observation ability of NPCs.

[1] The gelatinous cube is even adapted to graph paper, for Thor’s sake.

Are goblins likely to share their homes with mindless devouring beasts who would chow down on little goblin imps at will?

Maybe they are in the process of cleaning out that gelatinous cube infestation, but haven’t finished yet. That would be interesting: on the one hand, the goblins are happy that you’re doing their extermination for them, while on the other hand….

Marty said: “The game books are filled with various large carniverous mammal-like creatures that GMs love to sprinkle about to rankle the PCs.”

This is because people are guilty of forgetting that the nastiest creatures on earth are *herbivores*. Herbivores grow bigger, range further, and are often surrounded by hundreds of their brothers, sisters, cousins and aunties. Even your biggest, meanest predators like polar bears try to avoid tackling adult herbivores: they go after the young, the sick, and the otherwise fragile.

It is interesting to note that in the sea this dynamic is actually reversed. I remember reading an article some time ago indicating that while the late-Cretacous dinosaur die-off started on land with mega-carnivores, in the ocean the carnivores were some of the last to go because they were not bound to localized food sources.

Okay, I think I’ve reached the realm of “no one cares about this but you”, so I’m shutting up now. :)